Beppe Grillo has been the success story of the Italian election, with his Five
Star Movement becoming the country's single biggest party – but who are the
people in Beppe Grillo's army?

They are housewives, students, graphic designers, jobless factory workers, even an astrophysicist.

Many are in their 20s – less than a third the age of Silvio Berlusconi and the many other septuagenarians of the Italian political establishment.

Welcome to the new face of Italian politics – the Five Star Movement, led by mercurial comedian-turned-political activist Beppe Grillo.

His movement's stunning success in Italy's election, becoming the country's single biggest party, is about to propel more than 150 "Grillini" as his supporters are known, into the two houses of parliament.

The movement has won 108 seats in the lower Chamber of Deputies and 54 in the Senate.

"They are an army of unknowns who have never been in politics before," Fabrizio Rondolino, a political commentator and former director of communications for a centre-Left prime minister, told The Daily Telegraph.

Many of the new MPs and senators only just squeak past the minimum age limit of 25 for entering parliament.

Having captured more than a quarter of the vote for the lower house, Mr Grillo's movement, shortened in Italian to M5S, is now the biggest political force behind the centre-Right coalition of Silvio Berlusconi and the centre-Left led by Pier Luigi Bersani.

Roberta Lombardi, a housewife who has a 13 month-old baby, is elated but intimidated by the prospect of being made an MP in the lower house.

"I certainly feel a huge weight of responsibility. We're not the saviours of the country. But we are prepared to revitalise the political scene," she told La Stampa newspaper.

Exactly how the "army" will conduct themselves once they get into the corridors of power in Rome, and what policies they will bring with them, is one of the biggest uncertainties of a highly confused and fluid political situation.

The movement was only created in 2009 but its anti-austerity, anti-establishment message struck a chord with millions of Italians.

Its specific agenda remains cloudy, however.

Proposals mooted by the 64-year-old comic from Genoa include a referendum to pull Italy out of the euro zone, deep tax cuts, a big increase in health spending and investment in the "green economy".

Other policies are as alarming as they are unfeasible, including a 20-hour working week and the cancellation of Italy's two trillion euro national debt.

On Tuesday Mr Grillo announced that he wanted Dario Fo, the 86-year-old Nobel Prize-winning playwright, to become Italy's next president, when the incumbent Giorgio Napolitano steps down in May.

The movement now holds the balance of power in parliament but it is unclear whether it will be prepared to do a deal with the centre-Left Democratic Party in order to break Italy's legislative impasse.

"The people have chosen us because we are the people," said Alfono Bonafede, a lawyer and a member of the movement in Tuscany. "We are the people's spokesmen. Don't call us honourable members of parliament – call us citizens."

Even the question of the movement's leadership is confused.

Mr Grillo may be its undisputed king but he imposed a rule by which no member of the movement with a criminal conviction can hold office.

That rules him out because he has a manslaughter conviction from a car accident in the 1980s.

In an interview on election night on Monday, Grillo said his movement's success sounded a death knell for the traditional parties, forecasting that they would only last "another seven or eight months".

"They've failed, both Left and Right. They've been there for 25 years and they've led the country into this catastrophe. Italy's problem is these people. They won't last long. Not long at all."